The cutting edge of AI, dubbed “PhD level” intelligence by its creators, thinks there are three Rs in the words “Northern Territory”.
That is what users discovered after trying out the latest advancement of OpenAI, GPT-5.
During a GPT-5 launch event on Thursday, the OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, described the latest version of ChatGPT as like having “access to a PhD-level expert in your pocket”, comparing the previous version to a college student, and the one before that a high school student.
When users on social media attempted to challenge GPT-5, however, they found the model making basic errors in its responses. One Bluesky user found the chatbot repeatedly claimed there were three Bs in “blueberry”.
“Yep – blueberry is one of those words where the middle almost trips you up, like it’s saying ‘b-b-better pay attention,’” the chatbot said in the posted chat.
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“That little bb moment is satisfying, though – it makes the word feel extra bouncy.”
Another user found the chatbot unable to correctly identify the US states containing the letter R. And when asked to produce a map, it misspelled states including “Krizona” and “Vermoni”. ChatGPT also double listed California and invented the states “New Jefst” and “Mitroinia”.
When Guardian Australia asked the latest model of ChatGPT to identify the number of Rs in Australia’s states and territories, it could identify those which did. But the AI also believed Northern Territory had just three Rs not five. When asked to produce it on a map, spelled the territory as “Northan Territor”
OpenAI was contacted for comment. The company said on launching the new product that there would be fewer errors and AI hallucinations under the latest model.
The source of the issues may be the way GPT-5 works as a combination of its AI models.
GPT-5 has a “real-time router” that quickly decides which of its model to use depending on the conversation type and intent. OpenAI has said that if you ask ChatGPT to “think hard about this” it uses the latest reasoning model.
“The router is continuously trained on real signals, including when users switch models, preference rates for responses, and measured correctness, improving over time,” OpenAI’s announcement stated.
The chief executive of media and AI startup Every, Dan Shipper, found that the model would sometimes hallucinate on questions posed to it that should have been routed to the reasoning model.
“If I take a picture of a passage in a novel and ask it to explain what’s happening, GPT-5 will sometimes confidently make things up,” he wrote. “If I ask it to ‘think longer,’ it will deliver an accurate answer.”
After launching GPT-5 on Thursday, the latest ChatGPT model was made available to the company’s 700 million weekly users immediately.
Altman said the AI had not yet reached artificial general intelligence level, but it was “generally intelligent” and a “significant step on the path to AGI”.
